Today electronic device users often share content with other users on the web using a variety of different mechanisms including e-mail, social networking sites, instant messaging, photo sharing sites, social bookmarking sites, and blogs, to name a few. However, many operating systems executing on the devices typically do not play a role in facilitating sharing. Instead, for example, users generally have to rely on generic functions like the clipboard to copy and paste content from one application/website to another, or they have to use sharing functionality provided by each individual application/website. Other current content sharing techniques include “drag and drop” to move content from one application/website to another, and use of a file manager/browser application such as Microsoft Corporation's Windows® Explorer which exposes extensibility points as COM (common object model) interfaces to enable sharing. Some web browser plug-ins can also currently facilitate content sharing.
Although these current mechanisms function satisfactorily in some cases, they have limitations and are not specifically tailored for content sharing which can often make the user experience when sharing less than ideal. For example, users need to switch from their current application to use the clipboard to share content and applications/websites receiving the content do not specifically enable copy and paste with the clipboard to support sharing. Drag and drop is similarly limited by this lack of specific enablement for content sharing which can result in the user experience being cumbersome and not well streamlined. Using Explorer involves taking steps needed to store content for sharing locally and works only from Explorer and not for any content shown by a Windows application. Browser plug-ins for sharing are similarly limited to working just in the browser and cannot be extended to content shown by a Windows application.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.